“Honey lemon soda. All that time, I was searching for you.”

I feel like Honey Lemon Soda served as a bizarre counterpart to Medaka Kuroiwa this season. Both shows were romantic comedies with inconsistent production values, and both left me feeling very non-committal regarding my reactions to their premieres. If I tried to encapsulate the entirety of my feelings when watching the first episode into a single word, I’d say they were jumbled. Having now finished the season, not much has changed.

Above all else, I’ll say that, as a tale of overcoming bullying and building up self-esteem, Honey Lemon Soda’s heart is in the right place, but the pacing, writing, tone, characters, and production are all over the place. There are moments in this season when I went from being fully invested, to rolling my eyes, to fully invested again. This makes for an unintentional rollercoaster of both emotion and engagement.

For a period, I was considering giving it a mild recommendation, but it’s a bizarrely mixed bag of components which, much like J.C. Staff’s last adaptation, makes me wonder if the original source material handled these elements better. In the end, it’s too much of a mess to recommend, and it’s honestly arduous to get through.

The show follows Uka Ishimori, a high school student who spent the entirety of her time at middle school being bullied. Quiet and unassuming, her classmates took to mocking her by calling her “stone” due to her non-presence (her last name, Ishimori, translates to “Stone Forest”).  Hoping to improve upon herself, Uka enters a standard high school, rather than the exclusive one her parents picked for her, and thus encounters an array of characters who help expand her worldview. The most significant of these is Kai Miura, a dyed-blonde curmudgeon who encourages her to take new strides.

On paper, this doesn’t seem to be breaking any new ground, but the show sets itself apart by emphasizing Uka’s past trauma, and shining a spotlight on it. This approach has its ups and downs, and it leaves the romance feeling a tad underdeveloped. Miura isn’t a very interesting character. He’s effectively a dour pixie dream boy who shows up to broaden her horizons, but he comes across as lacking in depth. His only interests appear to be sleeping and Ishimori, and that just doesn’t add up to a compelling character.

The bullying itself exhibits my biggest problem with the series’ storytelling. It often aims to have big moments with little regard for underlying logic and realism. The bullies start off as two-dimensional tropes, but that can be fine. They’re a narrative device, so it’s okay if we don’t dive too much into their personalities. However, the more the show depicted, the less they felt like human beings.

I spoke about this in the beginning, but the show see-saws between emotional engagement and silly melodrama. For instance, without spoiling too much, later in the season Uka’s father accuses some people of bullying her. The behavior he describes exactly mirrors how she was treated in middle school. It would make sense if he was concerned about past events repeating themselves, but we know that he was unaware of her past treatment. It’s an instance of the show calling back to her bullying to twist the knife a little, but it doesn’t account for the logic of the moment.

The show is scattered with elements such as these, and they regularly undermine the sense of pathos the show wants to develop. It’s hard to be invested in the melodrama when you’re distracted by the logic that got you there. I’ve seen the show listed as a romantic comedy, but if the series is intended to be humorous, it never landed for me. Maybe we’re supposed to find the awkward moments funny, but awkward humor has never been my cup of tea.

The show is produced by J.C. Staff and TMS Entertainment. When I reviewed Demon Lord 2099 last season, I proclaimed that J.C. Staff wasn’t “the studio you go to for sakuga, it’s the studio you turn to when you want something produced that looks halfway decent on a budget.” That assessment feels just as true here, though I did find myself questioning some of their creative decisions.

Sometimes when you watch a series, you’ll notice a design quirk that distracts the hell out of you, but you gradually become accustomed to it. That was my reaction the first time I watched Kanon with its excessive moe designs. So I assumed that by the time I got to the end of Honey Lemon Soda, I’d have gotten used to everyone having piss-yellow eyes, but it never happened. It’s like an Elric family reunion, except blended with Pitch Meeting thumbnails. Uka has large eyes, and they’re a very bright shade of yellow. I know the show’s aesthetic is constructed around lemon yellow, but it legitimately bugs the crap out of me since it’s what the viewer’s attention is drawn to in every scene. Why stop there? Why not make the entire school suffer from jaundice?

I also noticed what I suspected were supposed to be cost saving measures on multiple occasions, such as using still images when characters were talking or over-reliance on pattern-backgrounds instead of environments. When implemented correctly, the viewer might not notice, but it’s used in abrupt bursts, and actually makes the scenes more difficult to follow. Some of it might be a stylistic choice, but once you notice what appears to be a shortcut, it’s hard to stop seeing them, and either way, it detracts from the experience. This becomes more and more pronounced as the show moves towards the end, with weird twitchy animation that seemed to be preserving frames, and bizarre presentation of shots. The OP and ED aren’t anything to write home about. The visuals are pleasant, but I can’t deny I find the music for both to be annoying, with the ED in particular being a definite skip for me. 

Before I wrap up, a few Notes and Nitpicks:

• Was “The Source Material Might be Better” the unofficial theme of this season? Maybe it’s due to the high volume of shows I followed, but it really seems like this was a question.
• I found the pacing in the penultimate episode to be very disorienting. I’m wondering if they had a set end-point they wanted to hit, and needed to rush to hit that mark. The production woes that I highlighted before become omnipresent, and it makes for an unsatisfying approach to the finale. The final episode itself wasn’t nearly as bad, but there were still a ton of animation shortcuts to be spotted.
• There is a lot of music that is appropriate to contemplation, tension, and drama. The galop from Orpheus in the Underworld is not one of them. It doesn’t help that you can’t feature that music in an anime without me having PTSD flashbacks to Fighting Foodons, but even if you remove the media literacy limited to a millennial raised on 4Kids anime, it is still a bizarre choice.

I really don’t want to hate on Honey Lemon Soda, as, like I said earlier, I feel its heart is in the right place, even if its brain often isn’t. The dialogue is regularly inane, and the production attempts to cover up shortcomings with pretensions. This leads to a wildly uneven show that may have worked in more capable hands, but in the hands of J.C. Staff, it borders on being laughable.

Score: 2/5